Our first official blog post! This will be our official communication channel for announcing updates from now on. I’d like to kick off with a casual quote which best describe the last few weeks for me.

Operations:

We are working on a lot of different things at the same time. Some things may not look like a high priority to an outsider, so it’s best to take you through the journey of our first pilots with advertising agencies (since that is what we are all about). AdCoin has clear benefits when it comes to payments: low cost- and fast transactions. In addition blockchain technology makes all the transactions transparant and potentially anonymous. While the technology works, we ran into some operational issues in our first pilots that need to resolved before running a proper beta test. The first thing we found out during our meetings is that advertiser would either pay in regulated currencies (EUR/USD etc) or they would need an official source to buy AdCoin (ACC) from. This is why we created getadcoin.com and the ability to convert EUR into ACC directly, see “the company” below. The next operational issue we encountered was that most advertisers are not as tech savvy as blockchain enthusiast so we need an easier wallet, see “web wallet”. While testing we had a couple of slow days with regards to mining, resulting in payment delays. The possibility to offer micro transactions with close to immediate payout is one of our core USP’s, so we need to step up our game regarding the difficulty, see “algorithm” below. Next to the previously mentioned the day to day operations continued. For this we need more and better support, resulting in this blog (yay!) and some other new features, see “support” below. We got some more stuff we are working on, but some things are better to keep as a surprise 😉

The Company

No, AdCoin is not becoming centralized! But in order to integrate with ‘the real deal’ advertising agencies, we need some bureaucratic support. All transactions are done by AdCoin Click BV, which is officially registered in the Netherlands and controlled by some of the founders. This company enables advertisers to buy AdCoin directly without first converting to Bitcoin and going through the hassle of an exchange.

Web Wallet

We are working on creating a web wallet which will be connected to the purchase through GetAdCoin.com. This means that you can get your AdCoin even when you don’t have a desktop or android (iPhone only…really?). This also enables advertisers to create company accounts from which they can manage their AdCoin balance.

Support

Our support has been an operational bottleneck, but we are close to overcoming it. Not only did we scale up with two dedicated support employees, but we are also improving all the processes that could lead to a support ticket. We finally found the time to create this blog, we are working on a community platform and better documentation and FAQ sections.

Other developments

While we work on the above, our lead web developer Jerry is working on creating a framework for advertising agencies to quickly adopt AdCoin. Creating our own resources and API’s will help greatly to adopt AdCoin.

For the ones who missed it, we are integrated in Coinomi, a great Android multi-wallet.

We are investigating wether or not (or when) to establish a second office in Spain. With Catalonia’s separation from Spain it might not be the best time to register there officially and rather branch out to Spanish speaking countries from our Dutch office.

There will be a separate update regarding our marketing next week.

Algorithm:

As a lot of AdCoin enthusiast already experienced it: the current difficulty regulator is not working properly. This results in slow confirmations and out-of-sync wallets. After AdCoin launched, the first couple of hundred blocks went very smoothly until the ASIC miners found us. We weren’t that naïve that we didn’t anticipate ASIC miners, however we overestimated the algorithm which results in big gaps between blocks (up to 48h). We are working on implementing the difficulty algorithm to Dark Gravity Wave v3. Dark Gravity Wave is an open-source cryptocurrency mining difficulty regulator created by Evan Duffield (Dash lead developer).

Pros – Benefits

Implementing the DGW difficulty will have significant benefits to the technical development of AdCoin. The regulator is created to prevent time-warp attacks on the blockchain. The difficulty adjustments will also cause more blocks to be found (lowering the difficulty faster), which should help us to find reach our target time-span of 1 block per 5 minutes. Releasing more block should also attract more miners, since the block reward is 25 AdCoin, one can potentially mine 300 AdCoin per hour. With more blocks being released the transaction time to send and receive AdCoin will be significantly lower.

Cons – Hard fork

Why do we not immediately update to DGW? Updating the main structure of AdCoin requires a hard fork. This means that all nodes (exchanges, pools, wallets) need to be updated in order to work on the new difficulty regulator. While we make sure no AdCoins will be lost from your wallets, we need to carefully plan this and make sure all pools and the exchanges will update as soon as possible after the release. With the exchanges having their hands full with the Bitcoin SegWit2x fork, we are currently planning the fork for the beginning of December. In the meantime we are reaching out to miners to maintain the network.

Communication:

In our continuous effort to improve our communication for both support and announcements we are reducing the number of communication channels. We need to allocate our resources as efficiently as possible and therefor decided to CLOSE our Slack. Actually it will continue to be here, but we will not post any updates and won’t be around much.

New Telegram moderators

Since our Telegram group is very active we are welcoming two new moderators, “J” and “Anne Douwe”. They will help with keeping the group free of spam and will help those with general AdCoin questions (personal questions should always be send to our support@getadcoin.com mail). All moderators are helping voluntarily, so please treat them with the respect they deserve!
Active developers and moderators in are AdCoin group are:
Ricardo – Developer / Founder
Patrick – Developer / Founder
Anne Douwe – Developer / Moderator
Nick – Moderator
J – Moderator

Thank you for your continued support and for any questions please drop me a message on Telegram!

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Our first official blog post! This will be our official communication channel for announcing updates from now on. I’d like to kick off with a casual quote which best describe the last few weeks for me.